Saturday, January 24, 2009

Clarke: That night, on 9/11, Rumsfeld came over and the others, and the president finally got back, and we had a meeting. And Rumsfeld said, You know, we’ve got to do Iraq, and everyone looked at him at least I looked at him and Powell looked at him like, What the hell are you talking about? And he said - I’ll never forget this - There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.

And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld in the least.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.

IMO: Of course, selective comments of that sort of nature can often be culled into an apparently authoritative but really biassed article after the event. That is how successful propaganda often works. But overall I did get the weary feeling that such shenanigans really encompassed the Bush regime. Signs are mildly promising that Obama will be somewhat better, but it is very early to speculate, and even with Obama, we must wait and see.

IMO: As for the particular extract above from the "Vanity Fair" article, that is how I also thought it probably happened at the time of 9/11. And it did seem one obvious way to proceed. We were probably lucky that the regime pussyfooted most of the way after that, relatively speaking. The use of nuclear bombs had then looked a reasonably sound option if you are handling things the way the Bush regime did, IMO. That is if they were really trying to succeed. Bulldozing a lot of guys into mass graves whether they have 'done it' or not is always likely to be a good way to tidy things up in such circumstances. I had thought to try to write a film scenario about the situation but decided it would be a non-starter. Maybe it could have been called "All the President's dogs", and bits included about dogs and Mohammed but it was a bit twee, compared to reality which usually wins hands down. The comparison would also have been unfair to dogs.